Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

Other relics of the sunken civilization emerge: underwater aqueducts, “floating forms of a Parthenon,” and “crumbled walls and long lines of wide, deserted streets.” Here was Atlantis, an “ancient Pompeii, buried beneath the sea.”

This was a vivid portrait of a lost world that prepared the way for the largely enthusiastic reception of Donnelly’s vision of Atlantis. In the grand perspective, too, Verne’s fictional account helped many late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers visualize the implications of the adventurous search. “Who shall say,” Donnelly wrote in 1882, “that one hundred years from now the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of our day?”

Donnelly’s Atlantis—like Verne’s classic science-fiction novel—was an instant smash hit. The author was inducted into the American Association of Science, and the city of New Orleans chose Atlantis as the theme for its Mardi Gras celebration in 1883. Besides that, Great Britain’s prime minister William Gladstone wrote an enthusiastic four-page letter to the acclaimed American author. In his humble home in the small town of Niringer, Minnesota, Donnelly was overjoyed, and wrote:

I looked down at myself and could not but smile at the appearance of the man, who in this little, snow-bound hamlet, was corresponding with the man whose word was fate anywhere in the British Empire.

The prime minister also spoke of seeking parliamentary funds for a naval expedition to find the legendary island. “I could have uttered a war hoop of exultation,” said Donnelly, the man who was soon to be widely heralded as the “father of Atlantis studies,” that is, after Plato himself.

Atlantis would, however, have a long fascinating life beyond these classic formulations. Later intriguing theories would place this lost civilization on the islands of Crete and Santorini, as well as in the desert (Sahara), high atop mountains (the Andes), underneath the ice (the Antarctic or Spitzbergen), or even in outer space. Not to mention the occult and mystical interpretations that have also flourished.

One last theory that did appear in Rudbeck’s day looked for Atlantis not in America or at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, or anywhere else other than Plato’s head. There was a sense that the philosopher had made it up, either for the sake of creating an imaginative fictional account or, more likely, as a philosophical discourse that set up a vision of an idealized world to portray the problems of humanity in general, or his Athens in particular. Such a view of Atlantis as fiction or fable continues to flourish in our day, though sometimes the creator of the story is said to be someone else: Solon, Egyptian priests, Egyptian tradition, and so on.

But Rudbeck was not convinced. After reading Plato’s dialogues, he could not accept a theory that placed the lost civilization anywhere outside Sweden.

LOOKING FOR ATLANTIS in the Americas was, Rudbeck boldly proclaimed, pure vanity. The entire theory was predicated on a fundamental misreading of Plato.

One of the main arguments for locating Atlantis on a continent in the New World stemmed from the philosopher’s description of the kingdom as “larger than Libya and Asia together.” Rudbeck, however, cautioned that Plato did not necessarily mean the same things by the terms Libya and Asia that later generations did. The meanings of words change over time, and the duty of a historian is to capture the meaning of the word that prevailed when the philosopher used it.

In Plato’s day, the name Asia did not refer to the entire continent that runs through the territories of Russia to the far reaches of Siberia, China, and Korea. Rather, “Asia was taken by the old writers to mean only the little Asia, which stretches from the Mediterranean Sea in the south to the Black Sea in the north.” Relying on his love of maps, Rudbeck supported his hypothesis with a slew of ancient geographers. Each authority confirmed that the ancient word Asia meant only the much smaller, far western part of the continent, or the area historians call “Asia Minor.” Likewise, Plato’s word Libya did not mean all of the continent of Africa, as many had assumed. The word in the philosopher’s time referred only to the far northern coast, basically the fertile regions and immediate outlying deserts surrounding ancient Egypt.

With this refreshingly historical effort to put Plato’s vocabulary in the context of fourth-century-B.C. conventions of the Greek language, Rudbeck had uncovered a serious problem at the heart of understanding Atlantis. It was no longer necessary to seek this lost civilization in a land larger than the combined continents of Asia and Libya. Instead it should be sought in a place that corresponded to the meaning of the words in Plato’s day, that is, a land larger than Asia Minor and northern Africa. In this one bold stroke, Rudbeck shattered one of the powerful arguments for placing the vanished continent in the New World, previously one of the very few places that could have satisfied the stringent conditions.

Besides that, drawing on his own experiences on tempestuous waters, with his commercial yacht and postal service, Rudbeck raised the eminently practical question that many theorists overlooked in their haste to place Atlantis somewhere in the Americas. This was directed less to the “learned, the wise, and the elite in the world” than to the common sailor:

If such a great navy should cross from America, and attack all of Europe, Asia, and Libya some thousands of years ago, when no one knew how to sail with a compass, no one dared far from the coast with a little ship, and no big ships were built which could withstand the waves of the great ocean, how well would they have held up?

“If I asked such a thing,” Rudbeck said, “I fear that the boatmen would laugh at me.”

For skeptics who questioned the testimony of a “common boatman,” Rudbeck issued a further challenge. Read the explorer’s accounts of the New World, take a look at the types of boats the natives used, and try to figure out how they would have fared in such a difficult transatlantic voyage. Plato was after all speaking not of a single isolated venture over the Atlantic, but a war of conquest that would mean moving massive fleets across the hazardous waters of the high seas. In an age before the invention of the compass or at least systematic knowledge of the use of stars for navigation, America was hardly a realistic prospect for the home of the Atlanteans.

Taking the offensive on yet another front, assuming for the moment that the Atlanteans had somehow managed to make the perilous crossing from America, Rudbeck raised another embarrassing point: “And should they have conquered Europe, Asia, and Libya in the old days just as Plato speaks about, then there should reasonably be some evidence of this Atlantis in their language, customs, laws, worship, and such things.”

The current war between Sweden and Denmark, for example, was leaving many signs, not the least the “thousands” of independent accounts of its progress. Few wars in history occur without leaving any trace, and it was thus not unreasonable to expect some survivals of such a catastrophic war as Plato described. Yet in the many centuries that had passed, Rudbeck reminded, no one had come up with any real evidence of ancient American influence in any of the places where the Atlanteans supposedly attacked.

So if Rudbeck was correct in his interpretation of Plato’s words, the existing knowledge of American boats, and the overwhelming lack of evidence of any surviving influence anywhere they allegedly conquered, scholars were clearly looking in the wrong place. “Either Plato’s Atlantis is a poem,” Rudbeck said, “or it is true, in which case it must be understood as some other land or island” than the Americas.

While he was on the subject, there was another matter that needed to be cleared up. Plato spoke of Atlantis as an “island,” but Rudbeck believed it was not quite so simple. Going back to the original language of the philosopher, Rudbeck noted that Plato used the Greek word (pronounced NAY-sos) to describe Atlantis. Scholars almost invariably translated this word as “island,” though, he noted, this did not have to be the case. could also mean “peninsula,” and for support, he simply pointed to the Peloponnesus in southern Greece.

This landmass was named using the Greek words Pelops, the wild chariot driver of classical mythology, and , the word in question. The Peloponnesus was, literally, “Pelop’s island,” and as anyone with a map knew, this was a peninsula. Clearly the term applied to islands as well as peninsulas—and as long as only one possible translation of was accepted, it was easy to miss many opportunities for finding Atlantis.

SIZE, SHAPE, TOPOGRAPHY, and even the blood-drenched ceremonies had all apparently agreed with Rudbeck’s unusual solution to the timeless mystery. No less exciting, Rudbeck had found the symbolic leader of the sacrifices, the king of Atlantis himself.

According to the Critias dialogue, the first king of this powerful civilization had been a man named Atlas, whose name in fact lived on in the word Atlantis and in the name of